The Importance of Acknowledging your Partner’s Feelings

I am one of the countless people who entered a marriage not really knowing how to navigate the challenges that characterize it.

On top of that I have married a Filipina and, on top of the challenges that characterize a quote-unquote “normal” marriage, I have to deal with culture-shock, which makes everything way more difficult.

That’s why I have resolved to study how relationships work.

I have spent a great deal of time studying my wife’s native language and culture but I have realized that this alone is far from being enough.

What really works in an intimate relationship, multiethnic or not, is having a clear grasp of the psychological mechanisms that take place an intimate relationship.

That’s why I have seen it fit to split my blog and create a new one where I’ll focus more on the Filipino culture and language (www.filipitaly.com), while this one will focus a little bit more on mindset topics (interspersed with some posts in Tagalog about various topics), precisely because I need to study both my wife’s culture and mentality and the principles of the psychology of intimate relationships that work cross-culturally.

VALIDATING OUR PARTNER’S FEELINGS

In this post I want to share an extremely important topic, namely why it is vital, in an intimate relationship, to acknowledge our partner’s feelings, especially when there is tension and emotions are volatile.

When emotions are high, wives don’t calmly express their feelings, they usually vent them.

Filipino people are particularly emotional people and they do vent quite a lot.

When a wife vents, the knee jerk reaction of a man is to defend, deny, counterattack or try to fix his wife’s emotions.

A very important concept that I have learned from various books and blogs on relationships is this idea of acknowledging our partner’s feelings or, in other words, validating her feelings, instead of denying or trying to fix them.

Usually men operate from the idea that when a woman is venting her emotions she is just being irrational, and therefore they either try to defend or justify or they try to correct their wife by basically trying to prove to her how her lashing out is unjustified.

What I have learned by reading material on the topic of acknowledging our partner’s emotions goes completely against the grain of what our psyche normally wants to do in these kinds of situations.

BECOMING A TEAM AGAINST THE CONFLICT

Our wife is our relationship mate and if a ship is sinking, shipmates need to work as a team against the sinking, not try to fix each other.

So, if a conflict arises and lashing out occurs, the best strategy is to try to understand where our partner is coming from, why she feels what she feels and validate or acknowledge her feelings instead of resisting them, opposing them or trying to fix them.

This is what intimacy, in the sense of into-me-see, entails and this is what becoming one with our partner entails.

REMOVING JUDGEMENT

What usually keeps me from acknowledging and validating my wife’s feelings, and causes me to try to correct them instead, is a thick cloud of judgements.

For a long time I have had a deep-seated idea that I am the Western guy in the relationship and that I come from a culture that is more efficient that my wife’s and that, therefore, whenever she expresses feelings of ideas, especially if this is done in a way that comes across as emotionally charged and irrational, I have to fix them.

And the fact that I have studied my wife’s culture a lot only adds to the problem because it gets me to come up with more labels and judgements like “this is the typical Filipino ningas-kugon attitude” or “she is acting out the typical bahala-na approach” or something like that.

Labels and judgements get in the way of intimacy and definitely keep us from acknowledging our partner’s feelings.

Labeling and judging, thereby defending our position and trying to fix our partner, instead of trying to understand them, amounts to putting our needs, worldview and self-agenda ahead of the relationship.

In an intimate relationship there is no such thing as me and my position to defend, there is only our position, our relationship.

Tricky and counterintuitive though it may sound, an intimate relationship is not about having a worldview that our partner has to fit into, otherwise we argue with them, we defend our position and we try to fix their wrong feelings.

An intimate relationship is about merging with our partner and becoming one by letting go to the fullest extent possible of all of our positions and boundaries (unless, of course, our spouse comes up with feelings, suggestions and ideas that are crazy and destructive, in which case it is better not to enter that kind of relationship in the first place).

DEFENDING AND TRYING TO FIX OUR PARTNER DOESN’T WORK

On top of being something that gets in the way of into-me-see, and that, therefore, creates a separation rather than intimacy, defending our position and trying to fix our partner’s feelings without trying to understand and acknowledge them is ineffective. It only causes our partner to become more entrenched in her position.

I see it happening all the time in my relationship. Filipinos are known for being matigas ang ulo, or in other words, very set in their ways, and a Westerner who tries to tell them how wrong they are only causes them to stick their head in their shell even more.

Western missionaries, business people and Western husbands of Filipinas, they all make the same mistake of trying to fix Filipinos without trying to truly understand where they are coming from.

But this is not just something that happens in interracial social intercourses (intimate or not), this happens cross-culturally and particularly in intimate relationships and, sure enough, it never works.

HOW TO ACKNOWLEDGE OUR PARTNER’S FEELINGS

So, it should now be obvious why it is important to validate our partner’s feelings.

But how can this be done effectively, in a way that causes our partner to remove her resistances and listen to what we have to say and become a team with us against the problem instead of dragging the argument and escalate it?

Basically by listening in a non-defensive way, or in other words, listening without interrupting while trying, not to come up with a clever argument to counteract what she is saying, but rather to get curious about why she feels what she feels and where she is coming from.

The second step is by saying something that makes her feel understood and that her feelings are being validated.

It could be something like “obviously you feel….” or “it seems like you….” or whatever else it is that doesn’t convey the idea that you are trying to defend, deny, counterattack or fix her.

It has been said that “you teach best what you most need to learn”.

Indeed, acknowledging my wife’s feelings, especially when emotions are high, is easier said than done. It is, in fact, extremely difficult to practice day in and day out.

I fail most of the time and it will take me years before I master this, but I am taking this process very seriously.

I hope this information I have shared will help someone out there.

For further information about this issue of acknowledging our partner’s feelings you could check out Jonathan Robinson’s book “Communication Miracles for Couples” or just Google and you’ll find plenty of experts who stress the importance of validating our partner’s feelings.

the Challenges of Being Married to a Filipina – ITALIAN HUSBAND OF A FILIPINA Italyanong Asawa ng Isang Pilipina (wordpress.com)